So I was out in the front yard yesterday taking advantage of our early sunny weather to clean up the weed-choked planter by the front steps. I managed to grab ahold of some rooty, woody-stemmed thing and yank the contents of the planter out in a massive ball of roots and soil, and as I did this a single hornet came buzzing out.
There in the bottom of the empty planter was a hornet nest the size of a tennis ball. Lucky for me, the wayward hornet seemed to be the only tenant. It had found the drain hole at the bottom of the planter and decided to set up shop. As I went inside to get the wasp spray, I decided I was glad to find the nest now – otherwise we'd have hornets flying around our yard all summer and no clue where they came from.
I gave the paper nest a good soaking, and when no other hornets came out I tipped the planter into yard waste can. The nest rolled in and broke apart, revealing a honeycomb-like core. And nestled into the cells of the comb, in a tight little ring, were about eight totally gross hornet larvae.
My reaction was somewhere between ewww and cooool and as I leaned in for a closer look I realized that the way they were arranged reminded me of nothing so much as chambered bullets in a revolver. Which makes total sense because everyone knows hornets are nature's small arms fire.
When the head hornet came back I squirted her too so she couldn't shoot me with more hornets.
Hey, when I redesigned this site late last year I scrapped a lot of stuff that I'm just now getting around to putting back. I never intended to turn comments off permanently, I basically just gave up on the design. They're back on now, and eventually I'll get around to bringing the Demo Club stuff back too. I was having all kinds of weird mental/emotional issues about the number of links and other garbage littering my old design. Actually, maybe that was just "winter."
Turning off comments seems to be a thing and while I can respect the reasons some people have for doing so, I've never felt the action was very welcoming. I'm sure there are people out there with haters to deal with, and I suppose that the presence of haters indicates you're doing something interesting. If you've earned a sizeable readership you've earned the right to moderate the incoming praise and/or scorn.
There's just something off-putting about coming across an insightful blog that has commenting disabled, dispiriting when it includes a multi-point post outlining all the reasons they've turned off comments, and maybe a little graceless when the post goes on to state that people who wish to comment should start a blog of their own. A lot of this is done in the name of "raising the level of discourse" or whatever, with analogies involving living rooms and what should and should not be said in them.
If blogs are the living rooms of the web, there's a contingent out there still covering their furniture in plastic wrap and asking us not to use the good cloth napkins. There is also spam, and haters. So -- pull up the drawbridge and we'll converse from our towers via Trackback smoke signals? Is Trackback still a thing?
While my friends continue to gravitate toward vintage API consoles, 2" analog reels and bespoke condenser microphones, I seem to be hellbent on recording with the cheapest gear possible. I probably won't rest until technology allows me pristine 24-bit audio clarity from shouting into tin cans strung with waxed twine.
Case in point: a few weeks back I bought a Korg nanoKONTROL2 which is a "slimline" control surface for mixing audio on computers.
A bit of explanation: most audio recording software has on-screen controls that mimic the buttons, knobs and sliders you'd see on a real mixing board in a real studio. It looks cool but it's a challenge to use these controls with a mouse or touchpad, especially if you just want to bump up a slider just a teensy weensy little bit. So smart hardware people came up with "control surfaces" -- a device with real buttons/knobs/sliders to control the fake ones on the screen.
Control surfaces can be very fancy and expensive but with the explosion of cheap n' easy home recording and laptop/tablet DJing it was inevitable that there'd be some cheaper options. The nanoKONTROL2 seems to be built specifically for those people in mind. It's USB powered so you just plug it in like you would a mouse. If you're using Garageband or Logic you can download a driver from the Korg website and go to town.
Here are some thoughts after using it for a few weeks:
It does exactly what it advertises. You get eight channels, each with volume slider, panning knob and buttons for mute, solo and arm (for recording). They work seamlessly with Garageband. The play/stop/record shuttle control is way nicer to use than awkwardly stabbing the space bar, and less noisy, too -- I can't count the number of times I've had to edit out the clack of a keypress at the end of a take. The marker controls aren't particularly useful unless you're working with video. Buttons are backlit when active.
It doesn't do much else.You can't really assign the controls to anything else, so don't expect to use the nanoKONTROL2 for recording automation or tweaking effects parameters. Updated: in the comments, Anders points out that he's successfully mapped the nanoKONTROL2 to things other than channel controls, so the deleted section maybe only applies to Garageband. Some pricier controllers can reset their knobs and dials to match your current project settings and commit settings to memory. You don't get that here, obviously. I've found the nanoKONTROL2 is best for when you want to get a mix going quickly from scratch. Once you've set some automation curves for volume or panning though, you can forget using this controller, as it has no effect on those.
It's small and light. If you're the type to record and mix on the go, like for podcasts or basic live recording, the nanoKONTROL2 is great. You can easily throw it in your pack with your laptop. It's probably ideal for Ableton Live users and DJs too. Take it on your next airplane jaunt and work on your electronica suite.
Build quality is meh. What did you expect for under $100? The buttons are hard rubbery plastic; the pan knobs are pretty smooth and tight; the channel controls are also smooth but the plastic sliders are a bit loose on a few, kind of like loose teeth. I feel like I got a "good" one and suspect that the quality might vary from item to item. It comes in white or black, and honestly it's not all that hot to look at. Overall the nanoKONTROL2 feels toyish, like it might end up unused in a junk drawer someday next to the 3rd gen iPod.
This is awesome. I LOVE the future. Cheapness aside, it's really great to be able to plug in the nanoKONTROL2 and get to mixing, being able to better "feel" where each instrument sits in the mix and control those levels more precisely than with a mouse. And did I mention it was under $100?
Overall, not too shabby for something I literally bought off a hanging rack like a pair of fancy socks. In the next version I'd like to see a cluster of, I don't know, maybe four generic knobs that were assignable to nearly anything, so you could tweak things like compression levels and envelope points with the same level of accuracy. As it is, you'll probably end up abandoning the nanoKONTROL2 once your keeper takes are recorded and basic levels are set.
And also: there's gotta be a market for just-as-simple but less ugly versions of these things. I can totally see this thing with all the same functionality but with the brushed aluminum deliciousness of a Macbook Air, with high-quality knobs and sliders.
If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it's no longer your work--the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval.
Does "Mastered for iTunes" matter to music?. Short answer: OF COURSE IT DOES. I'd wager more people own earbuds than home stereo equipment. Interesting tidbit about how Rick Rubin influenced the sound quality of iTunes files.
Spam-erican Apparel « DIS Magazine. A look at the dark, weird side of print-on-demand. I've used Zazzle lots of times for short-run shirts and mugs and the quality is better than most. That said, yeah, there's no real cost to creating anything on Zazzle so people are free to create a zillion shirts in the hope they'll appeal to a few customers.
Check out this best-ever anniversary gift from my wife. It starts out as a rather nice, perfectly utilitarian leather wallet (a little scuffed here from a few weeks of use):
Then you flip it over for the BIG REVEAL:
It's perfect. Perfect!
PERFECTION I SAY.
And not a moment too soon, as I often carry random picks in my old wallet which shake loose into my jeans pockets. Here's the guitar pick harvest from the day from the latest load of laundry:
My wife is the best. I'm sure yours is nice but mine is THE BEST.
Now here's a weird anniversary to observe: twenty years ago, I graduated from college.
May 1992. I graduated from the University of Akron with a degree in English that took me five years to complete. I wish I could say that I spent most of that time partying and engaging in illicit activities, but the truth is I was just an undiciplined so-so student with no idea what I wanted to do with my life upon graduation.
I remember graduation day. A gorgeous early summer morning in northeast Ohio. Walking around the campus as it slowly emptied of students. Filled with more than a little dread. I had no job lined up, certainly nothing that would lead to a career. My first job out of college was a porter at a nearby Holiday Inn. After five years in school I'd spend that summer running clean linen and pillowcases to the housekeeping staff and extra toothpaste and bathrobes to guests.
Sometimes I wonder where I'd be now if I'd taken a different path. Like a year off to just work, or a few years in the military, or Peace Corps, or whatever. I don't regret my college experience, but there's plenty of evidence that I was just going through the motions.
Who could have seen then that the things that led me to my career now, my life now, would be the things that most consumed me when I was fourteen? All those lovely summer days spent indoors pouring over issues of COMPUTE! and typing BASIC programs into an Atari 800. More summer days spent indoors learning every note of David Gilmour's guitar solos on The Final Cut. Who would I be now if I weren't such an indoor kid?
But I didn't study computers or music in college. For the people who are still making up their minds, college years are over and done before you figure out what to do with yourself.
A new Kin to Stars single. We recorded the base tracks way back in January, before the ice storm, but we're just now closing in on the final mixdown. I'm still very much enjoying working with Garageband and its constraints. I haven't found it lacking anything I could make do without anyway.
This track will also be the first to have a drum part that I played, not programmed. By "drums" I actually mean the DM6Kit I wrote about last year. It took an evening to come up with the part, another evening to rehearse and record. The final take that made it into the recording was the best take of at least ten or twelve with a few glitches fixed by hand. I was pretty tired at the end of that day. Still, it's way more fun to do drum parts that way.
I'm excited for this track to be finished so we can get it into your ears. Until then, if you haven't heard the first two Kin to Stars tracks we've released, you can find them here on Bandcamp.
I filed my taxes this week. As always, I have to include all music-related income. Here are my lifetime earnings from Spotify:
$2.58! Those numbers are lousy, but I'm not really bothered by this. I've only been on Spotify since 2010, I don't really promote it at all, and I'm still of the mindset that up-and-coming artists should choose ubiquity over cash. We need to be in these popular music services -- otherwise we're just hiding in plain sight. Make your money elsewhere.
Low payouts aren't what's bothering me about Spotify these days. This week Spotify rolled out its new Play Button, which enables people to embed Spotify-powered music widgets on websites. Now, there's nothing inherently evil or wrong about this, and I'd argue that it's an advantage Spotify sorely needed. Even the biggest chest-thumpiest gorillas of the digital music space, iTunes and Amazon, don't allow you to create an embeddable widget that plays whole songs and albums.
The catch: for the Play Button to work, the user must have Spotify installed. Fair enough, gotta get paid somehow. Users without Spotify are asked to create a free account. And to create a free Spotify account, you have to have a Facebook account. This is where I start feeling itchy.
Last week, Facebook famously purchased Instagram, the super-popular photo-sharing app for a kersnillion dollars. A lot has been written about the purchase and what it all means, but I don't think its reaching to think Instagram could become the photo sharing experience on Facebook.
Meanwhile, what's the Facebook music experience? Trick question: there isn't any. Facebook doesn't have a built-in way to share or listen to music.
When you consider that, Spotify's Play Button starts to look an awful lot like Facebook's web-wide Like Button rollout of a few years ago. Facebook understood that sharing -- photos, music, YouTube clips, articles, blog posts, thoughts, ideas, whatever -- was a key activity of ordinary-person usage of the the web. So they rolled their Like Button out to the entire web, making it easy to share cool, you-gotta-see-this content into Facebook's data-gobbling doom vortex. To join in the fun, you needed a Facebook account, of course.
The heated debate over Facebook's intentions with Instagram has reawakened the larger conversation over Facebook's overall business of providing a shiny funhouse that hoovers up your habits and profile data while you play and spits it back at you as advertisements. Some have compared Facebook to a "company town," and while others have taken issue with this characterization, it doesn't seem too off the mark. Working in the chocolate mines might sound great -- and hey, free chocolate! -- but you're still a miner working for Wonka.
So I wonder about Spotify. It's not hard to imagine that in their quest to become the music player for the web, they could easily become the music player for Facebook, which would give Facebook a pass to use my music (and any other artists' music) to feed their massive ad machine, while continuing to provide those depressing fraction-of-a-cent payouts that has better musicians than I up in arms.
If that happened, musicians would surely grumble, but would it lead to a mass exodus from Spotify? I guess that depends if you see any value in Facebook's 850 million users suddenly having an easy way to share and listen to music within Facebook itself.
Kirby Krackle's KRACKLEFEST gig last Friday was almost a disaster. Lucky for us, we had an arrow in our quill that ultimately saved the day: the best fans ever.
They knew every word. Every word! So when after a full day of chatting it up with folks on the ECCC tradeshow floor Kyle's voice was suddenly reduced to a croak by the second song, the crowd totally had his back. We had pre-sold nearly 200 tickets, and having a full house of nerd-rock fans taking the lead, shouting the verses to "Ring Capacity" and "Great Lakes Avengers" and more, was amazing to experience from the stage. We surfed that wave all the way to shore.
We had a lot riding on this show. We were all set up to do a live recording and were filming the whole thing in hopes of putting together a live DVD. That plan went out the window, which is disappointing, but in a lot of ways it turned into one of our best-ever shows. When people sang along, they sang loudly and enthusiastically. When we went back onstage for the encore, it was real, not some pre-planned B.S., we were very literally summoned back by the crowd. What an evening. Endless thanks to KK fans everywhere for saving our butts, and kudos to Kyle, for being the kind of frontman every band secretly covets.
